Sunset over the Hongjiannao Lake. (Photo provided to China Daily)
Local leaders play blame game over damage to ecology
China's largest desert freshwater lake that spreads on the border of Northwest China's Shaanxi Province and North China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region has dried up to nearly half of its historical maximum water area on record.
Hongjiannao, located on the border between the Shenmu county, Shaanxi and the Ejin Horo Banner, Inner Mongolia, had a water area of up to 67 square kilometers in 1969, and is the country's largest freshwater lake in the desert, news site thepaper.cn reported Wednesday.
Authorities from the province and region have been accusing each other for the situation.
Due to the drop of water volume, the pH value of the water has risen to 9.8, resulting in the extinction of as many as 17 wild fish species as well as a sharp drop in the number of gulls, said Dang Yabo, an official from the nature reserve administration office of Shenmu county.
The deterioration in the lake's eco-environment is caused by the interruption in water supply to the lake. Its two main sources - the Zhasake and Manggaitu rivers in Inner Mongolia - were dammed in 2006.
Dang estimates that reservoir construction has decreased the amount of water flowing into Hongjiannao by 80 percent annually.
However, Jiang Yuan, deputy director of Ordos' water resource bureau, argued that "we built the dams and reservoirs to supply water to the local residents."
Dang also noted that the coal mining project to be implemented in Erdos is only about 4 kilometers away from the lake, which will disrupt the underwater system and change the direction of the flow.
"The Shaanxi side is developing tourism and all we have done is to maintain the lake's original look and allocate land for forestry," Jiang said, refuting the claims of his neighbors.
Li Peicheng, an engineer with the Chinese Academy of Engineering who has been dedicated to the protection of water resources, said the Shaanxi and Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region's governments should work together to save the lake and share data to find out the real problem.
To address the eco-crisis of the lake, the Shaanxi side applied to the central government to elevate the status of the lake to a national protected reserve in 2015.
"By doing so, we hope the country will coordinate the two provincial areas and even issue policies to protect the lake…The application is still under assessment," Dang said.
At the same time, the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region is also making efforts toward a better outlook for the lake including cleaning up the blockages in the river channel flowing from the reservoirs.
The projected water supplement to the lake from the reservoir is estimated to be 1 to 1.5 million cubic meters, said thepaper.cn.
